We Take Things for Truth When They Need to Be More Thoroughly Tested

You see the problem fo obtaining facts from experience--it sounds very, very simple. You just try it and see. But man is a weak character and it turns out to be much more difficult than you think to just try it and see. For instance, you take education. Some guy comes along and he sees the way people teach mathematics. And he says, "I have a better idea. I'll make a toy computer and teach them with it." So he tries it with a group of chidlren, he hasn't got a lot of children, maybe somebody gives him a class t otry it with. He loves what he's doing. He's excited. He understands compmletely what his thing is. The kids know that it's something new, so they're all excited. They learn very, very well and they learn the regular arithmetic better than the other kids did. So you make a test--they learn arithmetic. Then this is registered as a fact--that the teaching of arithmetic can be improved by this method. But it's not a fact, because one of the conditions of the experiment was that the particular man who inveted it was doing the teaching. What you really want to know is, if you just had this method described in a book to an average teacher (and you have to have average teachers; there are teacher all over the world and there must be many who are average), who then gets this book then tries to teach it with the method described, will ti be better or not? In other words, what happens is that you get all kinds of statements of fact about education, about sociology, even psychology--all kinds of things which are, I'd say, pseudoscience.

Notes:

Because one experimenter gets positive results from teaching children with computers, it does not follow that everyone should use them, the experimenter may have had enthusiasm for their use, which would skew the results.

Folksonomies: science pseudoscience

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Teacher (0.852737): dbpedia | freebase | opencyc
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Science (0.602638): dbpedia | freebase | opencyc
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Psychology (0.465671): dbpedia | freebase | opencyc

 Mr. Feynman builds a Universe
Books, Brochures, and Chapters>Book Chapter:  Feynman, Richard , Mr. Feynman builds a Universe, American Association for the Advancement of Science, Retrieved on 2010-11-13
Folksonomies: aaas